The easily predictable disaster has been a disaster:

…two years before The Vessel opened, architecture critic Audrey Wachs was warning that the waist-height railings around the staircases would fail to prevent deaths: “When you build high, folks will jump.”

Even an “easy solution” came with predictions.

Three suicides in the early 2000s at New York University’s Bobst Library – which originally featured internal open-air balconies – offered both a warning and an easy solution.

This story just gets worse and worse.

Carla Fine, who has spent 40 years writing about and talking to those affected by suicide… lives in Chelsea, eight blocks from The Vessel, says the danger of the structure was obvious from the moment it was unveiled… “I knew what was going to happen… It’s a suicide machine.”

Despite the predictions, despite the easy solution and despite clear warnings… the deaths continued due to alleged negligence.

After the first death at The Vessel in February 2019, Fine raised the matter at a public meeting of the local community board. In March, representatives of the board wrote to Andrew Cantor, senior vice-president of Related, urging the company to install higher safety barriers – but it took no action. Over the next year, Fine wrote repeatedly to Related, as well as to Heatherwick Studios, urging them to take the matter seriously. When the next two suicides happened, she was still waiting for a reply that never came.

The total disregard for others comes through in another element of this story.

[Owner of the suicide machine] claimed that it could use, for promotional purposes, any photo of The Vessel posted online, without awarding royalties or due credit.

The owner said even if people did not lose their life, they were guaranteed to lose their assets.

I’m surprised the owner didn’t announce they could rob people visiting their site since they wouldn’t be needing anything after suicide.

Indeed, after multiple suicides the owner decided it would add a $10 fee to tax people at the bottom before their lives were taken at the top.

“If you want to kill yourself, usually you go ahead and kill yourself. Ten dollars doesn’t make the difference,” Fine says. The fact that Related was about to make a profit from the deaths to which its site was linked is also fairly unpalatable.

The owner also started a requirement for people to only be allowed entry in groups, a truly terrible and tone-deaf attempt to ignore safety experts yet again.

That only made the horror worse, because the boy who jumped yesterday did so in front of his family. The structure’s only purpose was to offer a climb and a view. The problem is that the adjacent shopping mall (no stairs or entry fee required) offers a similar view, and the observation deck 1,000 feet above puts them both to shame.

Does it even have any purpose at this point other than to increase preventable deaths?

And who designed this monstrosity of harm, an immediate folly in the truest sense?

The man responsible for this disaster design, Thomas Heatherwick, has no formal training in architecture. Patronage seems to be how he ended up with the job. His prior work was also shutdown as failure, also with massive losses.

During his tenure as London mayor, Johnson championed Heatherwick’s designs for a garden bridge across the Thames. The project collapsed in August 2017, leaving taxpayers with a bill of £43 million, making it one of the costliest project failures in British political history.

What is he doing now? Perhaps he should be forced to create a monument to the dead of Heatherwick Folly — “suicide machine” — paid out of his own pocket?

Apparently he already has some designs in mind.

Thomas Heatherwick is in discussions with a government minister over plans for a memorial to the victims of the Covid pandemic.

Victims of COVID?!

It seems incredibly cruel to ignore the deaths he allegedly is responsible for, which he easily could have been prevented. Many have pointed out his suspicious lack of response this whole time people are dying from his obvious design failure.

Even more cruel is if he has been thinking about the victims… in terms of another quick enrichment scheme to get a back-room deal to design a memorial elsewhere for something else.

Is Heatherwick thinking he can somehow redeem himself through another suspicious deal because it awkwardly shows he at least acknowledges suffering of someone? Or is it just bald corruption, lacking any more thought than moving along from big failure to bigger failure?

A long personal story published in Business Insider tries to reduce the stigma around those opposed to vaccines in order to help “change minds”:

The reason for everybody to get the vaccine is to make sure that the virus doesn’t mutate to a point where it’s resistant to the vaccines — now even the people with vaccines are in danger. As soon as I read that, I said to myself, “Oh my God, it all makes sense.”

Here’s the real kicker, though:

Whenever I hear stuff in the media in terms of vaccines, it’s always “It’s safe and effective, go get it.” There’s never a whole lot of data explaining why it’s safe and effective. That took a lot of digging for me. It’s not so readily available. And then once I got the data, I thought, “Why didn’t I know this stuff?”

The answer to his own question actually comes right at the start of the article, but the connection back to it was never made:

[Pop culture] made me feel like I had some special insider knowledge. From there, I got into fasting, detoxification, sunlight, walking barefoot, and so on. Through that, I developed a general mistrust of the medical community.

Bingo. The answers aren’t easy because, to put it simply, they aren’t easy. Working hard does work, such that the act of digging is really what led to “it all makes sense” more than any simple formula.

Maybe a better way of saying this is just because you’re passionate doesn’t mean success or knowledge is dropped in your lap. Question why you feel entitled to arrival instead of accepting a humble path to get there.

The article is a good example of how education of children needs to focus far more on cognition and systems thinking, instead of narrowly defined skills in specific trades that promise “special insider knowledge” while mostly allowing for ignorance.

On July 29th the Stanford Internet Observatory, arguably a Potemkin village by design, released the following PR statement:

Announcing the Journal of Online Trust and Safety… The journal was conceived from a recognition that much of the cutting-edge research on online harm lacks an appropriate journal for publication.

An “appropriate journal”? What was wrong with what people were publishing already? Hold that thought.

Notably, here’s the lineup written in the PR piece, claiming “a wide range” of researchers.

Led by co-editors Stanford, Stanford and Stanford. Stanford will be the journal’s initial managing editor. Founding members of the editorial board include:

• Stanford
• Stanford
• Stanford
• Stanford
• Stanford
• Stanford
• Stanford
• Stanford
• Harvard
• Harvard
• NYU
• NYU
• NYU

Why so much Stanford? Do I need to create a pie chart here?

Perhaps “appropriate” was a sloppy way of saying… content tightly curated by friends of the Facebook CEO working as censors in a Stanford-based front funded by the company to undermine critics?

Such a tyrannical mindset sure sounds eerily similar to the Facebook origin story.

And who genuinely thinks any “Online Trust and Safety” journal should have a disgraced name like Stanford on it at all given their history?

Let me propose another way of looking at this.

Reports have been coming in that Facebook ironically (and fraudulently) banned independent researchers working on transparency. They’re literally shutting down cutting-edge research on online harm and censoring independent publications, as their arm at Stanford complains an “appropriate” place to publish is needed.

Here’s the Verge today:

Facebook bans academics who researched ad transparency and misinformation on Facebook. The researchers say their work is being silenced.

And here is Input today based on Bloomberg yesterday:

Facebook banned researchers who pried into its ads and misinformation. Sure, go ahead and research us. But, um, you can only look at the data we’ve cherry-picked for you. Hope that’s okay.

And here is Mozilla today in a cut and dried blog post, basically openly calling Facebook liars.

Facebook claims the accounts were shut down due to privacy problems with the Ad Observer. In our view, those claims simply do not hold water. We know this, because before encouraging users to contribute data to the Ad Observer, which we’ve done repeatedly, we reviewed the code ourselves.

Facebook lawyers aggressively shutting down researchers while their Stanford arm announces a publication house for researchers… begs motive. So let’s talk about that too now.

Is the motive to coerce independent researchers into giving up their independence, to stick them (pun not intended) under a heavily weighted editorial group funded by Facebook?

At least one NYU researcher complained publicly via Twitter as well.

And so perhaps the most important point of all is when I reveal the names behind the unbalanced weighting of the editorial board, guess who is from NYU?

That same researcher. Laura Edelson is being listed as someone under the heavily weighted Stanford board.

There’s appears a very good chance that by gluing her into a Facebook-staff run Stanford controlled forum, she rides for a while in an illusion of being included in a process… while it is tightly controlled by people entirely opposed to her independent thoughts.

And what is everyone researching?

The “cockroach infested hellhole” was left behind by… the same Facebook executive who now is running the Stanford-controlled journal that he is claiming to be the only “appropriate” place to reveal the depths of his “hellhole”.

Guess where Henry Farid will soon be working? He also is being listed as someone under the heavily weighted Stanford board.

Remember that highly offensive Stanford logo at the top of this post? That’s their official “mascot” trying to chase and kill… the mascot of Farid’s academic affiliation.

Foreshadowing.

The PR piece from Stanford has all the hallmarks of deep corruption, a reminder of how Arthur Anderson auditors ended up in a “very special” contract to “help” Enron.

Remember why Arthur Anderson wasn’t issuing independent statements on integrity and executive accountability?

…she told me blowing the whistle had been like telling the Titanic captain “we’ve hit an iceberg, sound the alarm, come up with a plan” but the response was “icebergs don’t matter, we’re unsinkable”. I went on to report on the fraud trials and convictions in 2006 of Enron’s chairman Ken Lay and CEO Jeffrey Skilling.

Now imagine instead that Farid and Edelson found some actual “acceptable” publishing venue outside the direct influence and control of Stanford let alone the men they’re directly criticizing.

I mean imagine the CSO of Facebook was being held accountable as the Enron executives were, instead of running a speaking tour from an academic office to profit even more from the alleged crimes he facilitated.

America just might have a longstanding and widespread problem with these kinds of platform-based censorship tactics, just maybe.

It also reminds me of an American school that named itself after a traitor — the ruthless butcher named Robert Lee who fought for race-based tyranny — yet tried to deny a teacher the freedom to say that her students’ lives matter.

The school can’t both hold up a “policy prohibiting teachers from advocating for social or political causes” while calling itself a Confederate South academic platform.

Sorry, but no.

Using the artifice of being an academic space in order to silence critics should be called out for what it is — censorship.